After the final session of Festival of Media LatAm 2015, M&M Global reporter Anna Dobbie caught up with Blippar chief operating officer Ariff Quli and PepsiCo chief marketing officer Ricardo Arias-Nath about bringing their augmented reality partnership to consumers.
Arias-Nath said that the partnership allowed the companies to make story telling more inspiring for consumers: “Blippar is a great partner for us in that space.”
“There are two words,” said Quli. “Augmented reality is when you enhance your reality in the world you are in. Virtual reality is when you escape from everything so we are in the business of augmented reality.”
Quli described augmented reality as “a combination of computer vision, machine learning, artificial intelligence”.
“When you go into optic recognition you need a platform to build upon and those are incredibly difficult areas but there’s amazing talent out there and they are making advancements,” he added. “We know that consumers are changing all the time and they are looking for more and having those three platforms is really key to closing that gap.”
Looking to the future, Arias Nath said the companies are looking for applications across everything they do, from communications and promotions through to sales. “We really look forward to doing much more work, not only with the Pepsi brand but also across our full portfolio,” he added.
“The session with the influencers was very interesting and their perspective on how to deal with brands, it’s interesting to hear the side of the influencers,” he said.
Quli said the next stage was to look at “search with objects” and “how to make things easier”.
“We know in Latin America the amount of consumption of information of media in mobile is also very high despite the broadband issues and despite it being expensive, people use it a lot.,” said Arias-Nath. “This is today and the future is going to be even further so we want to be ahead and we want to be trail blazers in this area moving forward.”
Interview with PepsiCo CMO Ricardo Arias-Nath and Blippar COO Ariff Quli at Festival of Media LatAm 2015.
